We thought the recent blog post in Long-Term Living on infection prevention was spot on. Naturally, we thought about how perfectly an ozone laundry system complemented this focus, but it’s a broader issue than that.

Why Infection Prevention Makes Sense

Prevention is almost always cheaper than cure. The post raises at least two ways that prevention makes monetary sense.

The first is simply that infections cost a lot to clear up. They spread from person to person, and often by the time you know there’s a problem, it’s widespread. You end up treating a lot of people and taking extreme precautions to prevent further contagion.

The second is reputation and its cousin, liability. Spreading infections come to the attention of visitors and other residents/patients. This leads to a different kind of viral process, usually ending up in the email inbox of a newspaper reporter or a regulator. At this point, the costs really begin to mount up.

Prevention is Everyone’s Job

The LTL blog post notes that “Culture change has resulted in blended roles for personnel and this increases the risk for infection. Prevention is therefore not solely within the domain of the nursing staff anymore.” This includes your on premise laundry operation, of course.

Every single function in a health care facility is designed to support patient or resident care in some way. Most of them have direct or indirect contact with patients. For example, clothing is one of the vectors that can spread MRSA. That means your laundry operation has to be part of the prevention scheme and makes ozone’s anti-microbial effectiveness highly desirable (of course, ozone kills most kinds of microbial infections – it’s not just a MRSA preventer).

Facility-wide Prevention

We have seen studies that actually found gaseous ozone helped to disinfect whole rooms where a highly contagious organism had been present. Or, you might develop ways to use ozone to disinfect surfaces, especially in locations where harsh chemicals and chemical residues are a problem in themselves.

The DEL Clean Ozone Laundry Program focuses narrowly on the application of ozone disinfection and oxidation to cleaning, stain removing and odor removing in laundry. But the power of ozone can go beyond that, if the creative DON wants to use it.